162 W. H. Brewer—Hail in the Spray of the Yosemite Fall. 
Conway, the two persons most familiar with it, gave their esti- 
mates, pend as 60 to 100 feet” and “nearer 200 feet.” 
This ice-cone rises like a wall in front of the sheet, and then 
oe ‘fous its apex down stream for some hundreds of feet. 
The water pours behind it, finds it way beneath and emerges 
from an ice arch below, strongly reminding one, both in shape 
and general appearance, of the ice-arch in the glacier at the 
source * the Arveiron at Mt. Blane 
n the season, as the stream decreases in volume, it 
clings a ‘a wall for some distance near the top, but at this 
time it left the rock at the very crest, shooting well out into the 
air, falling the whole immense distance in one grand leap. As 
a member of the State Geological Survey in former years I had 
= the valley several times, always later in the season, and 
never before saw the volume of water half so large. From ob- 
servations made by Professor Whitney at other seasons, it is 
— that at this time the amount of water passing over the 
all was 250 or 300 cubic feet persecond. A heavy storm a week 
or so before had swollen the stream, and mud and sand had 
been carried out in the spray, tarnishing much of the surface of 
this ice which had before been pure 
As we stood. on the rocks near he above this ice—it was 
half an hour past noon—certain appearances suggested to me 
that the spray which drifted over it. was, in part at least, snow. 
To reach the middle of the ice, without ropes to cling to, was 
impossible, for no man could withstand the fierce blast. We 
ventured, however, as far as we could go, and where, at times, 
it seemed as if we would be biased into the chasm below 
Between the wall of granite behind and the wall of jce in 
front the stream fell with deafening sound. Great t volumes of 
furiously — the ice-cone toward the valley below. In this 
tempest, which stung our hands and faces like shot, we — 
abundant hail or ice-pellets. Their structure could n 
studied in the ee blast to which we were subjected; ine 
like hail-stones, they were of hard ice, tolerably uniform in size, 
and I estimated their diaantot at one-tenth of an inch. They 
accumulated on our clothes and on the windward side of rocks 
which came up through the ice-cone near its edge. They were 
found also —_, sy! on the rocks wach the side of and 
near the i Farther many depressions 
in the dirty. ice were allel wit rk ah a Pa like new white 
snow, but which we believed to be fresh accumulations of 
this hail ; — their position it was impossible to reach and 
examine 
“We eeraaced from the ice and then pushed our way back to 
the granite wall over — the fall pours, and went as near the 
